Crypto billionaire Chris Larsen can legally give Supervisor Matt Dorsey's reelection campaign no more than $500. Instead, The San Francisco Standard reports, he steered $25,000 into a different Dorsey account — one with no such ceiling, and a spending record the supervisor now concedes includes personal charges he has to pay back.

The vehicle is Dorsey's officeholder account tied to the Democratic County Central Committee, the elected party board that hands out coveted endorsements in San Francisco races. Because DCCC accounts sit outside the city's $500 contribution cap and its gift limits, they let deep-pocketed donors write checks many times larger than the law otherwise allows — a loophole San Francisco reformers flagged nearly a decade ago and never permanently closed. The Standard's review of Dorsey's filings, published this week, raises the question of whether the money funds party business or the supervisor's personal life.

San Francisco caps what a donor can give a supervisor's campaign at $500 and restricts most gifts to officials. There is a well-worn way around both, and The San Francisco Standard reports that crypto executive and political power broker Chris Larsen used it: a $25,000 deposit, on June 24, into Supervisor Matt Dorsey's officeholder account tied to the Democratic County Central Committee.

The DCCC is the 24-member elected board that steers the local Democratic Party and doles out the endorsements that can decide close races. Its officeholder accounts accept contributions of unlimited size — a structure ethics watchdogs have long warned can operate as a private slush fund. Dorsey is running unopposed for reelection in November and would have little use for a conventional war chest. The party account is another matter.

What the money has paid for is where the account gets awkward. In its review of more than a year of filings, the Standard reported a steady run of everyday charges — hundreds of ride-hailing and bike-share trips, dozens of restaurant tabs, and Apple purchases — that the disclosures largely leave unexplained, alongside retail buys the outlet flagged at Zara and Shake Shack. The reporting is by Gabriel Lorenzo Greschler and Maggie Angst, and it is those reporters, not The Dissent, who reviewed the underlying filings.

Dorsey has not disputed the account. He told the Standard he has since identified a handful of charges that were personal, not party, expenses. "I gotta settle it up. I gotta write a personal check for a couple things," he told the outlet, per its reporting. On one widely noted item — a Bay FC sweatshirt — the Standard quoted him offering a more specific explanation: "I assumed (wrongly) that wearing Bay FC gear for the pre-game ceremony aired on the Jumbotron would qualify that purchase as a valid expense." The Standard's own page confirms Dorsey said that, as of Wednesday, he had "sorted out a handful of charges to an officeholder account that were actually personal expenses."

None of this is new terrain for San Francisco. The DCCC contribution loophole was familiar enough to insiders that in September 2016 party-board members — including then-Supervisors London Breed and Jane Kim — voted to voluntarily cap their own DCCC donations at $500. Both blew past it, the San Francisco Examiner reported at the time: Breed accepted contributions as large as $20,000 from Salesforce and $5,000 from Laborers' Local 261 the day after the vote.

"It is like a slush fund, because there are no rules" in DCCC campaigns, Larry Bush, founder of the good-government group Friends of Ethics, told the Examiner. The paper noted that the city's Government Conduct Code bars candidates from spending money raised for one office on another — and reported that Breed nonetheless spent $7,000 from her DCCC account on a 2017 Pride parade float whose banner, in the largest font available, read "SUPERVISOR LONDON BREED DISTRICT 5." The rules on paper have rarely constrained the practice.

That history is what makes Dorsey's account more than a receipts story. A single $25,000 check from a crypto billionaire, routed through a party account most voters have never heard of, buys goodwill with a supervisor no opponent is challenging — and largely within the letter of the law. The officeholder-account lane San Francisco's ethics reformers tried to close in 2016 is still wide enough to drive $25,000 through.

Dorsey maintains the charges reflect his duties as a DCCC member. Whether the Ethics Commission agrees — and whether the personal check he promised the Standard ever materializes — will test how much San Francisco's cleaned-up campaign-finance system actually cleaned up.